[pembrook]

Literally every single company in the top 6 of the S&P 500 was financed via private VC-style funding at the beginning.

Whether the numbers crept into the billions when the company was private or public is irrelevant. The point is that for a company to reach scale, they need billions in funding from somewhere.

Somebody has to take the risk, and all investors want returns for that risk. Public market growth investors want rapidly growing companies just as VC investors do.

[scarface74]

None of the top six companies were funded by billions of dollars that were lit on fire like today’s companies.

The early companies like Apple and Microsoft were started with a few million not even a billion in today’s dollars. As I said earlier, Microsoft didn’t even need the later rounds of funding and wanted to bring expertise on board.

The only one of the current top tech companies that weren’t GAAP profitable at IPO is Amazon and even it used its own operating cash to fund growth.

[Apocryphon]

One would assume that there are different styles of VC-style funding, with different time horizons. My original point isn't disputing the need for the existence of VCs in some funding cases- I'm not DHH arguing that every startup needs to bootstrap- my point is that this cycle has shown that VCs pumping in dumb money while chasing unrealistic fast returns has led to self-fulfilling failures, and a toxic culture that promotes that. The original statement:

> do you want to grow slowly and steadily over a 20+ year period only to find that the economics don't work, or do you want to fail fast with some extra waste in the middle

Seems highly dubious because you can take a perfectly fine business model and create an unattainable, doomed-to-fail situation out of it by subjecting it to unrealistic expectations, as we have seen in dozens of examples from the current bubble. Stress testing is not useful if it sets artificial pressures that destroys the business.